Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

In the end there is only Matisse.

When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

So there's only one tactic for the state: kill the seers.

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.